Hydrogen is recognized to play an important role as a reliable energy supply source in the near future. At present, steam reforming of hydrocarbons, such as natural gas, supplies about half of the world's demand for hydrogen gas. The yielded product from this process is a mixture. To obtain pure hydrogen, the mixture has to be subjected to a separation process to remove CO2 and other undesired byproducts. One appropriate approach is using polymeric membranes by selective permeation mechanism.
Commercially available polymeric membranes have been applied in a variety of separation processes in the gas industry, for instance, hydrogen recovery from ammonia purge gases, enrichment of O2 and N2 from air, removal of acidic gases (e.g., CO2 and H2H) from natural gas, and dehydration of air and natural gas. However, most of the extant polymers show an inverse relationship between permeability and selectivity. In other words, a polymer having high selectivity exhibits low permeability and vice versa. Therefore, to overcome this trade-off, it is of great interest to develop new approaches generating membranes that offer both high permeability and high selectivity.